IE10 – What do you think of it?

I have just this minute installed Windows 8 and now giving Internet Explorer 10 a go. First impressions are that it’s really nice! I think they’ve made a bunch of improvements from IE9 (Obviously these “improvements” have been included in other major browsers for a long time already before IE10) such as being able to render box-shadow effectively etc.

I think ms has got it wrong thinking people want a desktop touch screen, e-whiteboard yah, tablets & phones yah, desktop nah. But thats an aside, IE 10 its another browser in the myriad of browsers today, with an engine that supports more of the widely available bells and whistles of css & html.

I’d probably say a big part of it is actually user awareness or lack thereoff people don’t know they need to update their browsers or choose another one, hence why old versions of IE were still prevalent, as people often stuck with the default browser that came with their install, evidence of this is the dramatic drop off of IE6 and IE7 and the decline of IE8 since when i think MS started pushing browser updates as important in windows updates.

IE9 was the browser that really brought things into line with the mainstream, and tbh I think any variation in IE9 or its successors are just going to your run of the mil browser differences.

IE10 is actually a pretty good modern web browser. Its CSS support is particularly good. It has all the recent CSS features we rely on in other browsers, such as gradients, CSS transitions, 2d and 3d transforms, animations, Multi-column etc, and they are all now unprefixed. Flexbox is also supported and needs a prefix, as the syntax changed after Microsoft implemented it. It is also the only browser AFAICT that fully supports CSS 2.1.

It also has great support for a lot of the more experimental or newer specs, such as @viewport (CSS version of viewport meta, only supported by Opera and IE), Grid Layout (only IE so far), Regions (IE and disabled by default in Chrome), and Exclusions (IE and nightly webkit builds).

So, from a developer’s viewpoint there is a lot of new toys to play with and most gaps in standards support have been plugged, bar a couple of exceptions. But, most browsers lack some features that developers want.

IE have been known to mislead everyone about what they can do. I’ve literally seen them claim that IE10 is the only browser that supports CSS3 gradients. The fine print said “prefix free”. There was this giant table with browser logos, and all had like 10 rows of crosses, except for IE which had 10 rows of ticks. I can’t even respect a company that does that.

talking css, then so far i’m very happy that i can concentrate on other issues than ‘worrying about IE’. conditional comments for older IE == no problemas. it feels like an important step that IE10 behaves more like the ‘others’. good start. keep it rolling.

I love the fact that it supports so much more and that it’s not a big stumbling block for developers anymore (“ok, it works everywhere, now let’s see how it is in IE” is pretty much in the past…although I never minded that much).

But I still prefer the developer tools of Chrome. Not because that’s so much better, but simply because I’m so used to it.

I guess the biggest hurdle IE has to overcome is the terrible reputation it has amongst developers, and that’s why it’ll be a tough road to catch up with the other browsers.

@Senff the IE developer tools are useful when trying to find a weird problem while in IE7 mode or something. For some or other reason, IE developer tools doesn’t inspect the DOM, it inspects the HTML. So yes you can add styles do a div, but you can’t inspect an element that was added via javascript. So that pretty much means no inspecting sliders/modals/any js component.

I don’t mind developing for IE at all, I just get annoyed that I allow myself to think they will ever change.

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